Today, at least four hundred human remains of Congolese ancestors are held in Belgian institutions.
They were collected by soldiers like Alphonse Cabra and Emile Storms, missionaries like Jozef Costermans and the Marist Brothers, doctors like Alexandre Fain, and administrators like Marcel Maenhout, within a colonial museum system that reduced Congolese dead to objects.
Well-known figures from the then Musée du Congo, now the AfricaMuseum, such as Armand Hutereau, Maurits Becquaert, and Olga Boone, also contributed to Tervuren’s Anatomical Anthropology (AA) collections. These are just a few of the profiles of these collectors.
Both Belgium and Congo possess museums, archives, and institutions, in addition to private documents of both colonials and colonized people, family stories, memories, community narratives, and critical voices from younger generations, which enrich our understanding of the colonial past.
By connecting these two, the ambivalence of the colonial past and its powerful impact become visible, but it also offers the opportunity to better understand collections of human remains and to make restitution concrete.
